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Closing the Global Opportunity Gap

Jan 21, 2013Brad Smith
Around the world, new job opportunities offer the promise of prosperity, but hundreds of millions of people are locked out because they lack the necessary education and skills. Unless current trends are reversed, this opportunity gap will deepen, creating even greater income disparities and stifling global economic recovery.

SEATTLE – We stand in the midst of a global economic tragedy. Around the world, new job opportunities are being created that offer the promise of prosperity. Yet hundreds of millions of people find themselves locked out of these opportunities because they lack the necessary education and skills.

Unless current trends are reversed, this opportunity gap will deepen, creating even greater income disparities and stifling economic recovery worldwide. To avoid this outcome, it is critical that business and governments around the world agree now on a strategy for improving educational opportunities, training, and global mobility for the next generation of workers.

It is estimated that 600 million jobs worldwide will need to be created over the next decade to make up for jobs lost in the recent economic crisis. Many of these new jobs will come from sectors in which advances in science, engineering, and technology continue to drive innovation and growth.

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The expectation that increasingly more specialized labor force will be available for the highly competitiveness-based world economy the west envisions, will increasingly result in diminishing returns for this kind of economy, for two reasons. First, the expectation that almost everyone will be willing or interested to get as far as university education and further is overstretched. We cannot all become scientists.

Second, this model is based on the willingness of educated people to live abroad, leaving behind their countries, mother language, familiar culture, and friends, for some of the advanced economy countries. Now, unless these are young people, anxious to live different experiences, such emigration initially corresponds to deterioration of their quality of life, and requires a slow transition to a better status.

The fundamental problem, which puts the barrier of a desire for such a globalized life too low, lies in the narrow motivation of specialized skills, a perpetual competitiveness race, and the accompanying lack of security prospects. When compared to the costs, there is a fundamental lack of inspiration, in the vision of the assumed reduction of global poverty that a well functioning global economy is supposed to deliver, which cannot motivate educated people that will live only once. Especially, with the prospects arising for the global middle class after the financial crisis, the expectation of prosperity becomes more and more distant for the part of the global population that is educated and has not been brought up in a money culture.

The biggest bet that the western world can place in the direction of closing the global opportunity gap that the article refers to, is to invest in the education of Chinese and Indian populations, or, more generally, the global lower and middle class. In any case, since specialized labor force is supposed to come from abroad to the advanced economies, the relevant investment needs to go abroad.